


gap year

by miss_tatiana



Category: Sagas of Sundry: Dread (Web Series)
Genre: :(, Drug Abuse, Gen, Mental Illness, Overdose, Suicidal Thoughts, like... these kids had a Rough year, mentions of:, set post ittd pre series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-22
Updated: 2018-10-26
Packaged: 2019-08-05 17:03:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16371608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miss_tatiana/pseuds/miss_tatiana
Summary: a study on how each of the dread kids lived through what was probably the worst year ever, after their first trip up the mountain.





	1. raina

**Author's Note:**

> drew on what raina mentioned of her school experience in the series for this chapter.  
> tw for a little bit of violence

Raina struggled to make every day a normal day. Just that was a fight now, of course, after what she kept trying to convince herself was due to a fever, or some kind of natural gas in the mines they’d so stupidly wandered into. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t have logically been real. 

Darby had said it was real. Raina hadn’t talked to her in almost two months. 

She’d tried, she really had, and it wasn’t even the distance that broke them up, it was the fact that Darby was different. Ever since the trip up Black Mountain. Raina tried not to let it change her, at least on the outside, but Darby had almost embraced it. It was too much to handle. She’d said that she couldn’t do it anymore, and Darby hadn’t tried to fight her on it. 

In a perfect world, she’d be able to focus on her studies. The mountain was almost six months ago, she should be able to move past that, and it wasn’t like she had a girlfriend to distract her. Not anymore. But she was finding it difficult to pass even the easiest classes, no energy to do work but no capability to rest either. She tried to draw and it was always either one of the only two pictures she had in her now. Darby, or the thing that had chased them through the mines. 

She couldn’t sleep. Not ever. She’d requested a single because she’d found herself lying awake at night, too petrified to move or even breathe when her former roommate came home late from a study session or a party. She’d hear the noises of someone entering the room and would seize up, hoping beyond hope whatever came in would mistake her for dead so it wouldn’t kill her. Her logical brain told her she knew who it was, and that she shouldn’t be too scared to open her eyes, but she couldn’t override her own fear. So, a single it was. Still, noises from beyond her locked door were enough to keep her up. Even silence allowed for fear, for her imagination to take up all the emptiness. 

She thought that maybe during the day, when it was light out, she could master that fear, because she knew it wasn’t real. She should be smart enough to stop fearing a nightmare. But the days were nearly as bad as the nights. She tried to go through classes and lectures and lunches with friends, but she was only half there, the other half just constantly vigilant, watching for something with horns. She’d laugh, but she wouldn’t hear the joke. She’d turn in homework she had to ask for help to finish, even on subjects she knew front to back. 

There was always a current of tension waiting under her skin, causing her to look over her shoulder and lock her windows. Some days, it was more noticeable than others. 

Raina hadn’t even known this day was a bad day until it happened. It had actually seemed pretty good. As good as days could get now. She had study painting, which she’d always loved in high school, and she let herself get lost in tracing the lines of the student seated in the middle of the circle of canvases. She tried not to think about how good it felt to do mindless things, to let some of that worry slip away. She was painting the woman’s hoodie in a dark grey when she saw it. 

Just a little shadow falling across her canvas, to tip her off that something was behind her. Panic gripped her chest, and she dropped her paintbrush. 

There was a voice- the thing was trying to speak to her in its grating, mocking tone. She had no idea how it had found her here. She was miles and miles and miles away from that fucking mountain. 

There was no weapon, no pocket knife like the one Sat had carried up the mountain with them, no glass to smash like Kayden had. She needed to improvise. Fast. 

She pushed the canvas off her easel and grabbed it, turning and using that momentum to hit the thing. 

It was worse than she remembered it. Horns stretching up from a blackened forehead, the skin ashy almost like it had been burned up when Kayden lit that fire. White bone face. Hooves. She hit it again, and again, and again, and again. 

It was strange. She heard every little sound now, but that day, she didn’t hear the screams of her classmates until the hallucination dissipated. 

Then it was an intense investigation by administrations for her and a trip to the hospital for her study painting instructor. Throughout the whole process, she was numb. She answered everything with, ‘I don’t know’, and sat on the bench beside the dean’s desk as he looked through her file, and called her mother. 

Once the dean listened to her mom explain the event that had happened end of senior year, he gave her a speech that seemed to highlight the school’s accommodation of mental health issues, and how they had counselors experienced in working with victims of PTSD, and how if she did anything like that again, she would be expelled. 

None of her classmates were eager to talk to her after that. She was glad she didn’t have to deal with a roommate. She hated it. People looked at her and saw the kid who almost knocked her professor out. But she wasn’t crazy, she was normal, and she wouldn’t have done that. 

She wasn’t crazy. 

She insisted that to herself, even as everything she put down on paper wore the skull of a goat instead of a head. 


	2. tanner

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> working with mostly stuff tanner said in the series and some of the stuff discussed in the one night only episode

Tanner had gone out of state. It wasn’t for a specific, prestigious college; he was going to community college as a sort of afterthought. Arizona was too close to New Mexico for his liking, but it had bigger cities and a better reputation and it was further away from that mountain and everyone he went up it with. His move wasn’t well planned, but for him there was just no other option. 

He hadn’t told his parents anything about what happened on the mountain, obviously. He was good at lying and he was good at hiding things from them. He had years of practice. One more secret, one more source of trauma, wasn’t anything new. 

He’d expected a bit of push-back from them when he told them his plan to leave, and was surprised when his father agreed to pay for college out of state. Thinking it over later, he realized they jumped at the chance to get him away from Kayden and Sat’s influence. A year ago, or even a few months ago, that would have made him furious, but now he didn’t have it in him to take offense. He knew they were bad for him; they’d proved it. He tried to convince himself he wouldn’t miss them. 

He’d thought that being away from New Mexico would be better, but not much changed. He still woke from nightmares full of what ifs- what if the ladder in the mine shaft had broken, what if they’d left Sat at the bottom of it, what if they got separated from Darby and Raina when they went into the cabin, what if he hadn’t been able to pull Kayden away from the fire. In his dreams, it was all real. He was still blindingly angry whenever he thought about what Kayden had done to them. He still couldn’t sleep with the lights out. 

He took classes he could pass without thinking, hoping that would give him time to process things without his grades suffering. He cut everything out of his life, piece by piece. He didn’t answer Sat or Darby’s calls. He stopped going to mass, even though there was a church older and bigger than the one at home just a block from campus. He tried to drop photography. 

And after he’d become the least involved in his own life as he could, he realized he couldn’t handle free time. It was overwhelming, stifling, just him and his thoughts. He was always on the edge of panic, enough practiced self control to prevent anything that people would notice but not enough to master his own mind again. This was the spiral he’d fallen into in the past- he was good enough at hiding things to keep people from realizing anything was wrong, but if no one knew, no one could help. It was a trade off he’d learned to make. Still, that was the closest he ever came to admitting, outwardly, that there was anything wrong. 

It scared him, so he tried to pick things back up. In high school, the way he’d coped was by doing too much, so he never had time to think about all the actual issues he was having. He switched into classes that required him to stay up past one every night doing work he didn’t care about. He kept taking pictures. He had a fascination with photographing darkness, fervently waiting through development to see if there was anything there that hadn’t appeared to the naked eye. He struggled to convince himself that his paranoia wasn’t making decisions for him.

There was no breakdown. Not for him. He didn’t lose his shit in front of anybody. He didn’t have panic attacks unless he was alone in his room. He was just constantly almost there, and if he could put off that anxiety or panic or fear just until no one could see it make a dent in him, it would be fine. 

He kept ignoring phone calls. He kept exhausting himself with schoolwork. He could make it through this, he reasoned, just like he made it through everything else. By putting off dealing with his emotions, putting off listening to his thoughts, putting off getting help until tomorrow. And then tomorrow, and then tomorrow, and then tomorrow. 

He wasn’t completely isolating himself- he tried to connect with classmates, accepted invitations to parties, even planned dates. He’d get to a certain point kidding himself he was finally going to find a new group of people, and then everything would crash in on him. He didn’t know how to be himself around anyone anymore. He couldn’t. And suddenly he couldn’t stop seeing Raina in the girl who would doodle flowers on his notes in Euro. He realized he was trying so hard to be outgoing because the guy in his study group had a laugh that could almost be Kayden’s. He stopped going on dates after a few months because it hit him that he didn’t like the girls he asked out, he just liked whatever bit of Sat they had in them. 

His life was waiting. Waiting until he got over his old friends, waiting until he could connect with new ones, waiting until things made sense again. Until he stopped having nightmares. Until he could look at darkness and just see darkness. Until every picture he took was free of goats’ horns. He knew he’d get there. He just had to wait a little longer. 


	3. darby

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> referencing some stuff darby said during the show, as well as amy v's thoughts on one night only

Darby was thriving. The trip up the mountain, while horrifying, had given her clarity and a kind of focus she hadn’t had since before she got her internship. The internship she’d dropped, as well as all her more difficult classes. She stayed in just enough to keep herself enrolled and to keep her scholarships, but they were things she could pass without putting in any time outside of class. She needed that time for research. 

She’d poured her mind into countless theories and studies, mythologies and theologies. Land history. Geography. She let the search for whatever that was and why it reached out to them take up every free moment of every day, let herself drown in it. She started straying further from scientific explanations - nothing was turning up that could even half attest to what she’d seen - and venturing towards the occult. Where zoology texts had turned up nothing, old religious accounts and books were practically spoon feeding her the information she needed. 

The thing on the mountain had to be some sort of demon - devils were known to appear goatlike, and were associated with abandoned pieces of infrastructure like bridges or even other mines - but that didn’t explain the journal. Why was it so obsessed with them? How long had it been watching them? How could it take on their forms?

If she could answer those questions, maybe she could figure out what it had been trying to tell them. Because yes, she was sure it had been trying to convey something. Nothing just acts out like that without reason. 

She picked up books on witchcraft not from the school library but from the local one, and she kept looking into the history of the land. People had gone missing on it before, and she thought back to the old man they’d had dinner with the first night up there, before things started going sideways. How long was it until he became a name on a list of people no one cared to look for, people who had disappeared on Black Mountain?

She tore through occult books, memorizing ritual after ritual and storing them away in her brain for when she returned to the mountain. But as time wore on, it became clear to her that she had to talk to the goatman as soon as possible, and that she didn’t have time for a trip back to her hometown. So she started doing things at college. 

First just little things- burning candles in her dorm window, refusing certain types of wine, and so on. That wasn’t enough, though. She felt like she might be establishing herself to beings on the other side, but she hadn’t been able to make contact. So she got more ambitious. Entire nights were spent memorizing Latin for incantations, and she drove out of the city to pick up necessary supplies. Special beeswax and salt from ancient flats that could now be excavated on mesas not unlike Black Mountain. 

For this ritual - a communion ritual - she had to be in a neutral place that could be used as a gateway. Not her room, not any classroom. Somewhere the goatman would be comfortable, something close to the mountain he lived on. Darby surveyed all of the campus’ outdoor spots with the eye for geologics that had got her the internship in the first place, settling on a secluded well overshadowed by a tree. The spot was behind the lab building and only accessed by a set of rarely traversed stairs. The tree would be a good connection to a natural life force, and the water in the well could turn bad energy into good energy, as water tended to do. 

She hoped all her preparations would be enough. 

On a night she didn’t have anything scheduled, she brought her bag down those stairs behind the lab building, and knelt in front of the well. She took a breath, and pulled out a bottle of india ink. She smashed it on the ground, and drew a circle out from that point of impact with the spilled ink. Then, she marked down the sigils. 

As she drew, she tried to keep her hands from shaking. There was no fear in her, just excitement. She murmured the Latin from her books, the words feeling natural on her tongue, like this was her first language. She coated her hand in ink, pressed it to the side of the well, and then to her own arm, creating twin marks. 

Then, with a shock, she realized she’d done something wrong. Her clothes, she needed to get out of her clothes. She had to be as the demon was, just a body, or the connection wouldn’t take, and the ritual would be for nothing. 

Nervously, frantically, she took off her earrings and jacket, pulled off her boots, took everything off. She hunched over the drawn circle, slight wind chilling her bare skin. She finished the set of Latin phrases, and there was silence. The air was heavy, filled with static, like just breathing could generate a shock. It was just a waiting game now, waiting for a voice in her head or a crack of thunder from above or the apparition from the mountain or footsteps. 

Footsteps?

Darby turned around, eyes locking with those of her geology professor. This couldn’t happen. Panic ran through her mind. No, no, someone else in the area would ruin the ritual, would ruin any chance she had at actually figuring any of it out. Her heart sunk, and she told him to leave. 

He did, after a while, confusion and distaste on his face. 

Darby rested her head against the cold, mossy stone of the little landing. It had been for nothing. She was angry - she was furious - that she’d done everything right, but someone else had ruined it. An uncontrolled variable, something she couldn’t make a constant, something she couldn’t rein in. The universe worked in strange ways, but it wasn’t supposed to work against her. Pushing through the anger, though, was a renewed determination. 

She would do the ritual again. She would do it as many times as she had to in order to get it right. She’d get answers if it was the last thing she did. She’d face whatever administration had to throw at her, whatever doctors they recommended after her geo professor turned her in, which she knew he’d do. 

She could picture the whispers on campus, in the staff room. Darby Trellis is crazy. Darby lost her mind. In actuality, that couldn’t be less true. Things were making sense for the first time in a long time. The world was finally written in a language she could understand. And she wouldn’t stop pursuing her leads until she finally had answers. 


	4. kayden

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> extremely referencing to how kay is discussed in the one night only special   
> tw for suicidal ideation, drug use

This last year had been, arguably, the worst year of Kayden’s life. And that was fucking saying something. It wasn’t that any one thing was considerably more shitty, it was just a lot of little shitty things piled up. Which still wasn’t new, it was just… bad. 

On the upside, the second he turned eighteen he moved out and into his own apartment closer to the middle of town. Ideally, it would have been in the city, but the city was expensive, and even working full time only got you so far. At least he was out of that house. He could go where he wanted when he wanted as long as he was off, and he didn’t have to take shit from anyone. 

There was also no one to rein him in, though, and he picked up worse and worse habits. He’d seen that coming, and he didn’t really try to stop it. There was no reason to. He did harder drugs because it was fun, because there was no one there to stop him. He started antagonizing everyone he wasn’t paid to talk to, just to see who would hit him. And when someone did, he fought back so half-heartedly he had to think about how it wasn’t even a fight he was after. He could hit things almost whenever he wanted. He was really just looking to get hit. 

He decided it was best to cut people off, because Raina was too sweet and Sat was too optimistic and Darby was too loyal and Tanner was fucking Tanner, and none of them deserved to have anything left for him but hate when he burnt out. Because he was going to, it was inevitable. He wasn’t sure how yet, or when, but he knew it was coming, and it would suck if he dragged them down with him. He’d drag everyone else down happily, but not them. He could only hope he’d make a good joke for them at dinner parties someday. 

He went through his days lackadaisically and his nights viciously, working just to get money to spend and then going out and seeing if he could get anyone to fucking deck him, or better, take him home. He knew he was falling into every stereotype people threw at him, and against his better judgement and the little amount of self worth he had left, he didn’t care. He figured he didn’t owe anyone an explanation. 

He tried school for a little bit, thinking it would make Sat proud if she could see him. The thing was, he was trying as hard as possible to not let her see him. That and they kicked him out after three weeks. They ‘couldn’t have that kind of influence on campus’. Kayden had laughed. 

He got worse as months ticked by, still ignoring Darby’s calls. Sat had stopped trying to call him after the first three months, which was a relief. She’d moved on. That was good. Of course, he hadn’t expected anything from the other two, who were probably convinced the whole mountain thing was his fault. That was also good; it’d be easier for them to hate him. 

When Kayden actually sat down and thought about what happened on the mountain, though - always while he was high, he couldn’t handle that when he wasn’t - he couldn’t put reason to it. It was hard to think through it all consecutively. For him, it hadn’t been a linear experience. He remembered the doubles. He remembered trying to kill the thing, and hoping less than he would have now that it would kill him too. He remembered its voice- he’d never forget that fucking voice. He figured, instead of trying to put a name to whatever that thing was and figure it all out, it would be better to accept that it was just another chip stacked against him.

That’s how he’d dealt with it, too. He’d pulled down his sleeves to cover the burns from the mountain just like he covered everything else, and figured that he was already taking shit from so many things and so many people, adding a fucking goat demon to that list wasn’t going to be too detrimental. 

But despite his new agency and despite his outward lack of concern for what happened on the mountain, he’d had the worst year ever. He was so alone that seeing people who had it better than he did made him angry. He’d come home to his apartment at whatever hour he made it back, and it would just be dark and shitty and empty and there’d be no one to brighten it up. He’d find himself longing for familiarity that he’d try to find with strangers and come up empty handed. He’d catch himself wanting to hear Sat’s laugh again, wanting for her to kiss him like she would have last year, or even worse, wanting someone, anyone, to be as fun to tease as Tanner was. He missed being the person Raina could talk to about her crush on Darby, he missed Darby’s wild sense of adventure. He missed how Sat’s hair felt, and how he used to be someone’s best friend. He missed getting his picture taken. 

And he thought it was extremely fitting that he should be having such a fucking awful time. You get what you deserve, after all. He could laugh about it sometimes. Other times, not so much, but sometimes. All the time, he knew that he deserved to feel hollow and alone, he deserved to miss people. That was how he was making them feel, after all. He justified it with the thought that they were better off without him, which was true. 

He pretended he didn’t miss his friends. He daydreamed of his own death, thinking up more and more elaborate, memorable ways to off himself. Interactions didn’t mean anything anymore; everything was empty and nothing felt real. Going off of that, he felt it his duty to screw up as many things and relationships and people as he could. Because he was unavoidably, unquestionably going to crash, and hell if he wasn’t going to try to drag everyone he could reach down with him. 


	5. sat

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in reference to how sat described her year in the show  
> tw for overdose, drug abuse

It had been what seemed like a regular dose. Looking back on it, she wasn’t sure if it was that she’d built up a tolerance without knowing it, and was taking more for the same results until she took too much, or if she’d just screwed it up unintentionally. It was the only thing she could do to block out nightmares reliving the mountain. Either way, she ended up in the hospital. Technically, she died. For only a handful of seconds, but still. She was dead. And then she was referred to this place in the city where doctors would help her get clean. Rehab. 

Her father agreed to pay for it, of course, on the condition she wouldn’t come back home. She didn’t really have a choice but to agree; it wasn’t like she had any money of her own. Not enough to pay for a month in rehab.

And it was horrible in there, but she lived through it. She wasn’t allowed to make calls to anyone but family, that was one of the hardest parts. She’d also had to get up at six every morning and share a room with a woman who talked to herself and take pills that no one would tell her the effects of, but she made it out, and for a solid hour, she felt through the roof happy. 

The sun was on her for the first time in a month, and she could breathe fresh air, and walk wherever she wanted without asking her doctor. She was clean. She could talk to her friends - god, she was so excited to call them - and she could wear her makeup again. She took the bus from the city back to town, just waiting to get home and get in touch with people and have real interactions with other real people for the first time in what felt like forever.

She got off the bus in her hometown, looked around at all the streets she grew up running in. The sun was setting; it was evening. It all hit her then- that she didn’t have a home to go back to, and that she only had about five hundred dollars, and that she’d lost her job when she went to the hospital. That she had nothing, and had lost everything. She swallowed panic - she was Sat, she was fearless - and refused to let herself quail. 

She went to the payphone on the corner by the theater, and pulled out and counted the change in her wallet. She had enough for a few calls, and she wasn’t going to waste one of them on her parents. She fed the slot a couple of quarters and punched in a number she knew by heart. She held the phone with both hands, trying not to smile, waiting. 

Instead of her best friend picking up, however, it was his father. In a rough, cigarette-fucked voice he informed her none too gently that Kayden moved out months ago, and that Kayden thought he was hot shit now, and that Kayden was a goddamn coward. 

She asked for his new number gingerly - Kayden’s father had always scared her - and wrote it on the back of her hand. She didn’t copy down the part about how Kayden was fucked in the head and not worth her time anyways, and she hung up as quickly as she could after that. 

She put in another fifty cents, put in the new number, and even though the euphoria of getting in touch with him had faded a little, it was mostly still there. 

She waited through a few rings, and then a voice that was most definitely Kayden’s said, “Hello?”

“Kayden, it’s me,” she said, twirling the phone wire around her finger. 

“Uh, Sat,” he said, and he didn’t seem as excited as she’d hoped. “I don’t have- a lot of time, I’m pretty busy right now.”

“What?” She heard him, but she didn’t quite understand. What was he doing that was more important than her? Moreover, what was more important than talking to her for the first time in a month?

“Yeah, sorry. Not a great time.” The more he talked, the more it sounded like he was strung out on something. “How are you, though?”

“So much shit happened,” Sat said, the excitement of telling him everything draining away like sand through a sieve. She wasn’t sure why - and she knew she wasn’t in a position to judge him - but she was almost disappointed in him. “Is there some time we could meet and catch up?”

“Um…” 

There was a long, drawn out pause, and Sat’s heart sank. She wanted, more than anything, her best friend, who, not half a year ago, would drop everything to spend time with her. “This weekend?”

“I work weekends,” Kayden said, and then he said something else, quieter, to someone who wasn’t her. 

“Are you with someone?” Sat demanded, and she felt cold. She shouldn’t be jealous, but she was. Waiting for her seemed easy enough; he should have just stuck it out a month or two. 

“Sat,” he said, and he sounded tired. “Of course I’m with someone.”

Sat swallowed her anger. “Right. Of course. You’re too busy for me, you don’t have time for me, but you-”

“Alright, you clearly don’t fucking get it. I’m-” 

“No,” Sat shot back, and she was hit with a wave of anger. She’d died. She’d spent a month recovering. She deserved to at least be taken seriously. “Your dad’s right about you, you’re fucked.” 

Kayden laughed. 

“Call me when your schedule isn’t so packed.” Sat hung up, and her eyes burned with tears of anger, and shame, and loss. She wanted to go home. But, of course, she didn’t have a home, not anymore. She also didn’t have a number for him to call. Everything she owned was in the bags she carried. 

She leaned against the wall of the phone box and cried, for the first time in almost a month, giving herself the time to get all the confusion and terror and loneliness out. When she pulled herself back together, she decided that she was going to survive, even if everything and everyone was against her. She would stay clean, she would stay safe, and she would live through everything that was thrown at her. She could do it without her parents, she could even do it without Kayden if need be. 

She was a fraction of what she used to be, but she was still a survivor, and she’d stay one for as long as she had to. 


End file.
